Current statistical spam detection techniques rely heavily on their ability to find words that are known to be associated with spam email during classification of electronic messages. The authors of spam emails have become aware of this, and have started to purposefully misspell words in their messages. Most legitimate email contains many more correctly spelled words than misspelled words. On the other hand, a lot of spam email (especially short spam messages) often contains so many misspelled words that it is difficult to read at normal speed. Additionally, phishing emails are well known for containing spelling errors.
What is needed are methods, computer readable media and computer systems for allowing detection of undesirable emails, even where misspelled words have been inserted.